I put my hands flat on the top of my thighs, under the table, where he cannot see them. I breathe through the nose. I lock my jaw against the quip that is already halfway formed, and I swallow it back down, and I do not make a joke about being spoken to like I am actually worth spoken sentences. The jokewould tell him what he already knows. It would also cost me something I am not yet sure I am prepared to spend.
So I sit very still. And I take it. And I find that taking it, as a posture, is something my body has not rehearsed.
‘Third,’ he says. ‘I am not going to ask you to decide anything for my benefit.’
‘You just said it’s your responsibility.’
‘It is.’ His voice is quiet. ‘It is my responsibility that we are sitting here at all. It is my responsibility that this happened while I still have academic responsibility for you. That part is mine.’
I say nothing.
‘But I am not going to decide for you what you feel about something that has happened to you. Or between us. You are eighteen, and you are sharp, and I am not going to insult you by telling you what your own mind is.’
He looks down at the table. At his hands. Not at me.
‘So you are going to go back to Fallowfield today in my clothes, because yours are frankly still wet in places. I am not going to discuss this at this table. I am not going to ask you for reassurance. I am not going to make you comfort me because I am frightened by what I have done.’
That lands somewhere under my ribs.
‘You are going to sit on your own bed,’ he says, ‘and you are going to decide what you want to say to me. If anything. And then you are going to tell me. Or you won’t.’
‘And you?’
His mouth tightens.
‘I will listen. And I will abide by it. Whichever way it goes.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s the only answer I’m allowed to give you today.’
The silence is so absolute that the fridge hums into it.
And the brass comes back. Because insecure and brass are apparently the same thing, and because I cannot sit in a room with a man saying things this serious to me without the swagger finding some bolthole to come out of.
‘I wanted it,’ I say. I make my voice steady. I am surprised to find it will obey me. ‘I’m not going to let you sit there being grown up about it without me putting a hand up as well. I walked into the office hours on purpose. I wore the jeans on purpose. I leaned across the desk on purpose. Don’tyoudare pretend I was just sat there being eighteen and you came and got me.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Good. Because I was not.’
‘I heard you.’
‘I chose you the second you turned round at the board in week one.’
‘I heard you, Ewan.’
‘I am hearing you too, Dr Haldrey, and I am telling you that the grown-up speech is landing, and I am not asking you to stop, I am just—’ I swallow ‘—I am just also asking you to know I chose this too, and I am going to carry whatever half of it you are not carrying, and I am not going to let you make me feel like a thing a thirty-one-year-old man walked into without my permission. That’s all.’
He closes them for one full second. Opens them again.
‘Alright.’
‘Alright?’
‘Alright. I hear you. The halves are yours too. Shared responsibility, with me holding the bigger half because I have more of the things that can lose in this room. Agreed.’
‘Agreed.’
